This must have taken quite some time to make... a whirlwind tour of the wonderful world of Leopard. Nice.
No not toys made by the Birmingham based Capsule girls who put on great events like Supersonic, but toys from Japanese vending machines. Pingmag have done a great round up of the scene showcasing some of the best and strangest on offer.
Scroll down the article to see the “Don’t eat these! They are poisonous mushrooms!” range of toys.
“A collection of vintage logos from a
mid-70's edition of the book World of
Logotypes”
Head over to this Flickr set to see some truly great and inspiring logo work. This book reminds me very much of the books by Yasaburo Kuwayama. It's funny to see so many logos in this collection which remind the mind of logos created fairly recently.
[Edit: Thanks for the keen eye Tiago]
Check out Al Jaffee's fold-ins for Mad magazine, from the 1960s to the present, in interactive form.
When something as phenomenal as spider pig comes along, rest assured some one with a great job will create something as awesome as this...
Full size here
PingMag once again come up with the goods — this time with a feature on New Graphic Design in China. Some utterly fantastic work, highly recommended. I’ve picked my faves below.
Pingmag have a nice collection of pretty fish bait. Ohhh the colours — I like to take reference from colour schemes from abstract sources like this.
Ha!! (Also via swissmiss)
Have a great weekend! :)
You can buy these in magma. For some reason they remind me of the promotional paper hats you used to get in the 80's. Nice.
Kuler, the colour sampling tool from Adobe has had a update recently and now allows you to upload an image and create a colour theme from that image. Pretty cool stuff.
Nice interface too.
Cut to the chase — SXSWi really blew me away. I cannot recommend the event enough. I only managed to attend 2 days, by the time I had to leave on the Monday I was seriously gutted; a glance through the program for the final 2 days revealed dozens of very interesting talks and events. Fortunately, many of the events are available to download as podcasts from the SXSW site. Wish I could have caught this — at my new favourite Texan billiard hall.
And that really gives you an idea of how great SWXWi really is. It is the most exciting and comprehensive event I've personally attended. What impressed me highly, was the sheer diversity of the schedule and quality of content. A previous conference I attended last year kept referring to web design from 2001 as being ‘back in the day’ and the term Web 3.0 was dropped on several occassions. Yawn.
SXSWi wasn't like that at all — it was refreshing to attend an event with such an open attitude from both the speakers and the audience. Not once did I feel it was trying to be too cool for school, or self referring.
So I've come away from SXSWi utterly inspired and excited at the future for digital media and for the future of TAK!
I'd like to notably thank the SXSWM team who I went over with. Everyone was really friendly and let each other do their own thing whilst at the same time re-group and share experiences and thoughts. Digital Central and Stef Lewandowski who organised the trip should be commended for their enthusiasm and commitment to getting 7 differently skilled individuals together to document their findings. I'd like to thank Stef in particular as he had the foresight to create the SXSWM central reserve for us to use during our time at SXSWi which proved invaluable whilst over there. Really great stuff.
Each of us will certainly bring back something unique from SXSWi and this will ultimately raise our own and Birmingham's offering.
The last talk I attended was hosted by Peter Kirn and Joy Mountford entitled Data As Art. This talk would prove to be the most inspirational talk out of my time at SXSWi.
I'm a big fan of Edward Tufte and simplifying data through graphics and visual art. I'm also really into generative art and using Maths to create visual graphics. This talk showcased some of the best in the field.
On a simple level representing data visually not only makes something which is impossible to understand into something very easy to understand. See this video clip to view the flight paths of aircraft over the United States over a 24 hour period. Millions of numbers through visual interpretation becomes easy to realise and understand. (Lets put it this way, I was shitting my flight home after seeing this!!)
To see some of the videos from the talk, click the image above or here.
After Joy demonstrated several experiments that she had worked on at the Yahoo Research Labs, Peter took over and gave a basic intro to Processing — a program used by many to visualise data.
He also demonstrated creating audio with Processing with a small application which converted his spam emails into music. He joked how laptop musicians are often referred to as 'checking their emails' whilst performing live. So he decided to make music whilst checking his emails. Nice.
Perhaps the best way to further explain what this whole scene is about is to check out some of the key people in the field right now. These are...
It's really hard to put into words what I experienced during this talk but I came away completely inspired. So much so, that I am considering a learning Processing and setting up a website (with
Expression Engine) to document my experiences and experiments. I've dabbled with
Max/MSP before but Processing results seem to be more visual and is the syntax seems similar to Actionscript but way more powerful. Apparently the community is very supportive and there are some excellent forums helping newcomers like me to learn the ropes.
Definitely the most inspiring talk of SXSWi.
Feeling quite inspired after the Logo discussion I headed over to a 15 minute book reading by Thom Singer about networking at conferences called,
Some Assembly Required.
I'm crap at networking, I'm the kind of person who absorbs stuff in so I thought attending this session would give me a few angles on how to get out there at these conferences and not to hang out at the back.
The talk was pretty short — just 15 minutes — but crammed full with useful information. The best piece of advice (and it's common sense when you think about it — isn't everthing?) is to simply say hello and take it from there. Thom retold the story about how, the day before, he met a chap who was setting up a focussed social networking start up. He met him simply because the man’s name tag said he was from New York. There had been huge delays in getting down to Austin from New York and so that provided the seed to start the conversation. He finished the whirlwind talk explaining how his daughter had a rare skull disease which was pretty much incurable. Through his network of friends he found himself with the opportunity to speak to a brain surgeon who had developed a new technique which would cure the problem — the only man in the world. It was a poignant moment to finish on and really hit home how a simple “Hello” could change everything.
As he left I decided to put his words into practice and turned to the chap sat next to me. Turned out he was the same man from New York who the speaker had spoken to the day before. We got chatting and he explained his start up project
Get Naked. Going against the grain of Facebook and MySpace where bigger is better, his project was to keep the stuff you want to share with your friends to yourself. It wasn't about having ‘friends’ with those you barely know, It was about sharing and communicating with your closest friends. I liked that — I really dislike the whole “how many friends have you got?” mentality. It was a good chat, I gave him our TAK! promo pack and he gave me his business card. Thom Singer said, one of the most important things to remember when networking is to follow up the meeting afterwards, which I intend to do.
I was on a roll after that and instantly got into the networking mode and shared a beer with Nicholas, a producer of the
Austin American-Statesman before heading over to the Adobe Lounge to see if I could find Sara Forsberg. Sara works for
Adobe and recently asked us if we would be featured in their
Design Center project. Unfortunately, she wasn't at SXSWi but I did end up having a good long talk with other key Adobe staff and again swapped contact details.
This networking thing is easy!
